Look Out For Ushahidi

Talk about exciting stuff! Ushahidi is a brilliant example of smart web and mobile technology put to the service of a very worthwhile social cause, in this case violence in Kenya. What enthralled me, was Erik’s announcement of the soon to be released, Ushahidi 2.0, ‘a free, open source version, rebuilt from the ground up that anyone will be able to use around the world’.Ushahidi just won the 2008 NetSquared Challenge.

I can very well see having several Ushahidi sites, to cover various aspects of the climate crisis, from food, to water, to natural disasters, to the witnessing of environmental deterioration. This way, citizens from all over the world can become live witnesses of the negative changes taking place in their environment, and get connected with the solutions to remedy these changes.

Erik is also the guy behind Afrigadget, another project well worth checking out.

3 Responses

I think there’s a lot of hope in these sorts of things. Historically, communications and information technology have been used for harm. Some of the first IBM computers were used by the Germans to keep track of the people they killed and their slave labour, transistor radios were used to co-ordinate mobs in the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

But then in the recent Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah war, Israeli and Lebanese bloggers were commenting on each-other’s blogs during the conflict. This contributed to an early end to the conflict, as their shared words spread out into the media generally. So for example Israel may have said, “okay, this regional head of Hezbollah has an apartment in this building, let’s take him out – sure, there are five other apartments there, but that’s not our fault if he uses human shields.” And in the past that would have been good enough, but when someone is blogging from the next apartment building and talking about it…

It’s not inevitable that more communication brings peace. Iraq, after all, has had many bloggers telling their observations of the conflict, and the place is as miserable as ever. Nonetheless, the spontaneous experience of Israel and Lebanon offers us some hope.

And a deliberate attempt like this is even better, I think. We’ll have to see how it goes, the internet’s a new medium, hard to know what’ll work…

Hi Marguerite,
Just wanted to say hello from the Ushahidi team kindly email me with your contact info so we can ping you once we have an application for you to test out.(this could be soon!)
With Best regards and thanks for highlighting our project…,
Juliana